Americans Get Little Bang for Health Care Bucks

Time magazine reported this week that the U.S. spends more per capita, $7,026, on health care than any other country in the world. We also pay more for health care as an overall percentage of the GDP, with 16% going towards health-related costs. With that kind of spending, one would expect our health outcomes to be superior. But in truth, the state of Americans’ health is shameful when you realize how much money we spend.

For example, the Japanese have a life expectancy of 83 years, while Americans just beat out Panama (76 years) with an expectancy of 77.9 years. Japan only spends 7.9% of its total GDP on health care costs. Looking at these figures, you could make an assumption that the Japanese might have a genetic advantage; that they naturally are a healthier people. But multiple studies have shown that after immigration to the U.S., the health status of a family or an ethnic group as a whole will decrease dramatically in the second generation, before there has been any chance for ‘bad genes’ to come in and ruin things.

The reasons for the disparity between the health of people in the U.S. and other developed nations, despite extravagant healthcare spending, are complex. I have taken courses that devoted entire semesters to trying to figure this conundrum out. Nevertheless, there are still things that you as an individual and we as a nation can do to try to improve our health and quality of life.

1. Don’t Smoke, Even Socially – Tobacco use is the number one “actual” leading cause of death according to the Center for Disease Control. Smoking increases your chances of getting several different forms of cancer (not just lung and mouth cancer) and heart disease. Plus, smoking gives you wrinkles.

2. Be Active – Poor diet and physical inactivity combined are a close second true cause of death for Americans. The modern ‘conveniences’ of today make it easy for us to just sit around and get out of shape. There are little things you can do in your everyday life to avoid inactivity, like taking the stairs instead of an elevator, using a bike to get around, and actually getting your hands dirty once in a while by gardening or doing home-repair.

3. Limit Your Alcohol Consumption – Despite its legal status and high social acceptability, alcohol is now commonly understood to be bad for your health. Alcohol usage has been linked to liver, mouth, colon and even breast cancer as well as the more classically associated alcohol diseases such as Cirrhosis. While many people relish recommendations regarding the potential heart benefits of having an occasional drink, this should not be considered a carte blanche for binge-drinking or even having more than one or two drinks in an evening (depending on if you are a female or a male respectively). In fact, recent studies have shown that earlier reports of the benefits of low level drinking turned out to be misleading.

4. Eat a Well-balanced Diet By Cooking For Yourself – Fast food restaurants provide little choice over the kind of ingredients that go into their calorie and cholesterol feast. By cooking for yourself, you can have absolute control over the quality of the food you eat. Work with your busy schedule by cooking large portions a few nights each week, and then enjoy the leftovers for lunch and evenings when you don’t have time to cook. The Department of Health and Human Services has a list of healthy and simple recipes that you can try and the vegetarian/vegan blog Post Punk Kitchen has some more radical approaches to healthy eating.

Still, when Canadians need hip surgery, they come here. I guess I’m a little scared of the contra-positive: what would our expectancy go to if we stopped spending that much? (of course, this would have to exclude any increase in efficiency. Increasing efficiency leads to lower costs but wouldn’t reduce services).

As you point out, it’s not genes so much as diet, exercise, and bad choices that make us less healthy. We keep complaining about the results of the health care system when we keep having to average in the early deaths of smokers and the overly obese (that didn’t get there genetically). We need to rethink our diet and everyday activities.

It is true that you can find some of the best medical care that money can buy in the US but that is not the average and access to any kind of medical serves is difficult for many people who live in rural areas or don’t have insurance.

Obviously preventative care would reduce costs tremendously while increasing health outcomes. Also we could reduce end-of-life medical treatments and focus on palliative care instead to manage pain. On average, the costs needed to keep someone alive increases exponentially as they age. If people accepted death better and choose to live one week less (a week in which they probably are in a great deal of pain anyway) we could save billions of dollars.

The hardest thing of all is that the cost of living healthier is vastly greater than living unhealthily. The day they make a 99 cent salad that will fill me up like a cheeseburger does, you better believe I will be there. Same things go for fruits and vegetables. If I buy them from Safeway they cost me up to and including 40 dollars, if it weren’t for the farmers markets here in Baltimore, I’d probably be even broker than I already am. Not to mention, unhealthier. LAME.

I think that if people became more health conscious and proactive with their health this could make a big differnece in the lives of the general public. As far as on the macroscopic picture it would be tremendous for the US healthcare system to incorporate more values and ideas from other medical systems such as Traditional Chinese Medicine. There is plenty to that can be learned from other countries and how they are able to cope with their health dilemmas. Slowly but surely this change is being implemented in the US healtcare system, as doctors are learning more about alternative medicines and also insitutions such as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine are pushing for change.